Validation of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

A dedicated project to validate the CAMS forecast and reanalysis products on ozone and precursor trace gases, aerosols and greenhouse gases.

The Atmosphere Monitoring Service of the European Copernicus Programme (CAMS) is an operational service providing analyses, reanalyses and daily forecasts of aerosols, reactive gases and greenhouse gases on a global scale, and air quality forecasts and reanalyses on a regional scale. CAMS is based on the systems developed during the European MACC I-II-III (Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate) research projects until 2015. In CAMS data assimilation techniques are applied to combine in-situ and remote sensing observations with global and European-scale models of atmospheric reactive gases, aerosols and greenhouse gases. The global component is based on the Integrated Forecast System of the ECMWF, and the regional component on an ensemble of 7 European air quality models coordinated by Meto-France. CAMS is implemented by the ECMWF.

KNMI (Henk Eskes and Jacques Claas) is co-ordinating the CAMS sub-project on the a-posteriori validation of the service products. This validation project is documenting the quality of the atmospheric composition products produced by CAMS. This project is a partnership of 13 European institutes. The partners of CAMS-84 (validation) can be found here. CAMS-validation makes use of a host of observations including surface in-situ, surface remote sensing, aircraft, balloon as well as satellite observations. It collaborates with major observation networks such as NDACC, GAW, ICOS and others, see Fig. 1. The validation results can be found here. One example result is shown in Fig. 2.

The activities of the validation project include (see also Fig. 3):

Three-monthly updates of a comprehensive validation report for the CAMS-global forecasts and analyses, for reactive gases, aerosols and greenhouse gases.

Evaluation of the European regional air quality forecasts above the surface.

Fig 1: Overview of the observational datasets used to evaluate the CAMS products (images in centre).

Fig 2: Example of IAGOS aircraft measurements of O3 and CO, taken during take-off and landing (http://www.iagos.fr/cams/) over Kinshasa, Congo, 16 July 2016, compared with the CAMS analysis (red curve) and a run of the CAMS system without assimilation (bl